The Edge of Sleep Read Free Page A

and dropped them behind him on the sagging Naugahyde sofa. The sofa frequently doubled as a bed for the owner, and his form was permanently molded into the cushions.
    Karen allowed herself to study Becker for the moment that he wasn’t looking at her. He seemed so little changed by the intervening decade since she had seen him last. The unfairness of it almost made her laugh aloud. She was showing every one of her thirty-six years and probably a half dozen more thanks to stress and insufficient sleep. By all appearances Becker, whose internal life she knew to be as tormented as a self-flagellating anchorite’s, seemed impervious to age. The jawline was still as firm, the stomach as flat, the eyes as unwrinkled as ever. There was a bit more gray in the hair, but that only served to add a touch of distinction. It was worse than unfair. She thought he had even improved with age.
    “So you’ve been a hermit for all this time?” she asked. “Hermit—or pariah ... let’s just say I’ve been living alone and managing well enough.”
    “I’m glad to hear it. I mean, that you’re managing well enough.”
    “Which is not to be confused with liking it,” Becker said.
    “So how often do you look at my file?” she asked.
    Becker shrugged. “A couple times a year.”
    “Why?”
    He shrugged. “Going fishing? Why do you suppose I look at it?”
    “I didn’t want to suppose. I wanted to know. That’s why I asked you.”
    “What makes you think I’ll tell you?”
    “Because I think you’d rather be honest than smart,” she said. “You’re completely without guile when it comes to women, aren’t you?” She touched the back of his hand and he recoiled slightly with an involuntary movement.
    “Have you been theorizing about me for the last nine years?”
    “It’s been ten years, and it wasn’t a full-time preoccupation.”
    “And you concluded from my lack of guile that I’m a block of stone, is that it?”
    “On the contrary. I think you’re the most vulnerable man I’ve ever known.”
    To her surprise, Becker looked away from her shyly.
    After a moment he said, “I’m not going to do it, Karen.”
    “Do what?”
    “Whatever you’ve come to ask me to do.”
    “Okay. I didn’t think you would.”
    “I can’t ”
    “I understand.”
    “I have everything under control now. I want to keep it that way.”
    “You no longer feel the urge ...”
    Becker shook his head. She tried again.
    “The compulsion ...”
    “Desire,” he said.
    “... to kill ...”
    “More like lust than anything else. But stronger. Much stronger ... but it’s gone now. There’s no reason for it to arise in my new life.”
    “I understand,” she said.
    “I doubt it. The only people around who can really understand are in prison.”
    “You put them there,” Karen said.
    “Some of them. Some of them I killed.”
    “You were always justified,” she said.
    “So they tell me.”
    “Why don’t you ever take it easy on yourself. John?”
    “Because everyone else does, I suppose. Somebody’s got to punish me.”
    He grinned, but she knew he was not joking.
    “You’re a lot more open about it than you used to be,” she said.
    “It’s the AA twelve-step method. First you admit what you are to the group. Problem is, I can’t seem to get a group together. Every time I find somebody with the same problem, he ends up dead. We never seem to have conversations.”
    “You didn’t kill Roger Dyce.”
    “No.”
    “He tried to kill you. You were alone with him, he was armed, he tried to kill you. The man had murdered at least a dozen people, he killed an agent, he was about to kill your friend, the cop ...”
    “Chief of Police. He’s touchy on the subject. Tee Terhune.”
    “You had provocation, you had cause, you had opportunity. Maybe you wanted to, I don’t know.”
    “I wanted to. The way an addict wants a fix.”
    “But you didn’t. You didn’t. You brought him in.”
    “It was a very near thing,” Becker